1. Akismet – This is by far the best anti-comment spam tool plug-in you can use for your WordPress installation. It’s so good that it comes included in the WordPress!

2. Easy Google fonts – This plug-in provides a very nice method of font implementation to the different elements on your website. It carries out all the hard work for you and even gets added to the WordPress customizer. You’re given the freedom of adding additional controls CSS element font sections through the ‘Google fonts area’ accessible through settings.

3. Marketpress (lite) – It provides an excellent and easy way of selling items on the Internet. The free of cost lite version comes with PayPal integration, enabling you to start earning some easy cash from the word go! You may be tempted to buy the pro version, but it’s quite expensive and you’ll be asked to re-subscribe and pay up even more if any updates come out in the future. So, it’s best to use the lite version only.

4. Yoast Seo – Not everyone cares about the search engine optimization, but if you do, you’ll not need anything other than Yoast SEO to do the job for you. You might be tempted to try out several other alternatives, but they put a hell lot of load on the website’s server. You wouldn’t want that?!

5. Ajax Thumbnail Rebuild – Using this plug-in, you can rebuild all the images inside your media library. So, if you’d like to alter their dimensions, you can do it easily through the ‘media area’ accessible via the ‘settings’. It doesn’t burden the hosting service in any way because of the manner it operates with the Ajax. Avoid using this plug-in if you already have the ‘Post Thumbnail Editor’ plug-in installed.

6. Jetpack – The king of all the plug-ins out there, this one is a must have simply because of the various modules contained in it. It’s written and maintained by the ‘Automattic’ so you can be certain that it’s very well written and is always kept up-to-date. The number of different tasks it can perform cannot be listed out all here inside one post! Just go through it and you’ll know what I’m talking about!

7. Custom Post Type Permalinks – Using this plug-in, you can style the custom post type permalinks is in any way you deem fit. The only shortcoming of this plug-in is that it makes the changes applicable on all the custom post types. You don’t get the freedom of selecting the ones that you wouldn’t want changed.

8. Post Thumbnail Editor – The thumbnails generated automatically and by default for your added images (to the media library) are created using the central box view area of your images. What the system does is that it crops out this area and you’re allowed no control over what gets displayed inside the thumbnail. Using the ‘Post Thumbnail Editor’, you can crop the thumbnails from wherever in the image you like, as per your needs!

9. Wordfence Security – This plug-in carries out an auto scan of your WordPress installation and checks it for problematic codes, hacking attempts and other important issues. It provides you with a report of all the different tasks happening on your website, both login related and otherwise.

10. Google Analyticator – Using this plug-in you can easily add Google Analytics on your website. It features an extremely easy-to-use interface and has excellent dashboard visuals too!

11. Convert Post Types – We all know the kind of impact custom post types have on the plug-ins. It may sometimes be necessary to convert the posts that have been set into specific post types, into different ones, or back to the original posts. This plug-in can help you do that easily.